The Obama Administration is set to fire CGI Federal as prime IT contractor of the problem-plagued Healthcare.gov website, a report says.

The government now plans to hire IT consulting firm Accenture to fix the Affordable Care Act (ACA) website's lingering performance problems, the Washington Post reported today. Accenture will get a 12-month, $90 million contract to update the website, the newspaper reported.

The Healthcare.gov site is the main portal for consumers to sign up for new insurance plans under the Affordable Care Act.

CGI's Healthcare.gov contract is due for renewal in February. The terms of the agreement included options for the U.S. to renew it for one more year and then another two more after that.

The decision not to renew comes as frustration grows among officials of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which oversees the ACA, about the pace and quality of CGI's work, the Post said, quoting unnamed sources. About half of the software fixes written by CGI engineers in recent months have failed on first attempt to use them, CMS officials told the Post.

The government awarded the contract to Accenture on a sole-source, or no-bid, basis because the CGI contract expires at the end of next month. That gives Accenture less than two months to familiarize itself with the project before it takes over the complex task of fixing numerous remaining glitches.

CGI did not immediately respond to Computerworld's request for comment.

In an email, an Accenture spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report.

"Accenture Federal Services is in discussions with clients and prospective clients all the time, but it is not appropriate to discuss new business opportunities we may or may not be pursuing," the spokesman said The decision to replace CGI comes as performance of the Healthcare.gov website appears to be steadily improving after its spectacularly rocky Oct. 1.

A later post mortem of the debacle showed that servers did not have the right production data, third party systems weren't connecting as required, dashboards didn't have data and there simply wasn't enough server capacity to handle traffic.

Though CGI had promised to have the site ready and fully functional by Oct. 1, between 30% and 40% of the site had yet to be completed at the time. The company has taken a lot of the heat since.

Ironically, the company has impressive credentials. The company is nowhere as big as some of the biggest government IT contractors but still is only one of 10 companies in the U.S. to have achieved the highest level Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) level for software development certification.

CGI Federal is a subsidiary of Montreal-based CGI Group. CMS hired the company as the main IT contractor for Healthcare.gov in 2011 under an $88 million contract. So far, the firm has received about $113 million for its work on the site.

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